Is Auto-desk Falling Behind With Rigging technology, Blender the new Answer..?

[Leemurray3d]

I'm a Freelance 3d character design modeler & animator. I've have been using Maya for many years for Modelling, Rigging & Animation, but in my workflow I use Zbrush for Sculpture because it has a better results & 3d Coat for UV Mapping & Retopology because there is absolutely no messing around, it's done in seconds.

Maya seems to be falling behind in my opinion..

I'd like to start a discussion regarding Character rigging.. I think Auto-desk needs to get with the times and produce an Auto Rig which is suitable for Both feature film and Games animation.

( Body and Facial Animation )

Blender users are capable of producing Automated Rigging solutions such as Rigify and BlenRig 5, But Auto-desk Maya has nothing apart from the Perseus Rig built by a 3rd party but no longer supported, and Ice Rig which maybe released one-day .. by a 3rd party at a cost I guess.. All very good if you don't need a rig straight away, right this minute or you don't mind spending a couple of years learning to rig 🙂

With the Amazing invention of (Nimble collective developed by Jason Schleifer) Freelance Artists are now able to work from any location worldwide and produce high end feature film, game or advertising animation.

A major limiting factor for me working as a freelance artist using Auto-desk Maya is the fact that Rigging in Maya is a painfully long draw out process which takes years of study to become anywhere near useful. 

Auto-desk should be looking to produce a tool set for 3d Artists to produce work quickly and (focus on the Art & Story rather than technicalities). 

Most Major companies are now striving to make work easier, rather than long winded & drawn out. The technology is already available to make rigging extremely easy but it seems as though rigging technology is guarded like a secret recipe and only a limited few are capable of using it.

I love the way Maya is so easy to use for Animation and 3d modelling but the drawn out process of Rigging for me means that I am regretfully switching to Blender as my main piece of software. Recently I read an article on Blender being almost as good as Pixar's in house software with almost all of the same features. 

This makes me think that unless Auto-desk pull an Amazing rabbit out of the hat they will start to loose a major proportion of the market. The futures shows that major studios won't rule the roost anymore, it's the little man with all of the expertise, technological know how, Artistic skills and absolutely no over heads who will win in the end. 

Why choose to pay $4000 dollars to use Maya when you can use Blender 3D for free, build your own studio from home using Nimble Collective and make your own fortune. Auto-desk needs something a lot more special to keep the customers coming back and needs to evolve with the times..

If Auto-desk were to sit up and listen, which they won't because one man's opinion never counts..

My preferred choice would be to have an Auto-desk workflow 🙂

My current workflow is to Design characters in Sketchbook Pro, Sculpt in Pixologic Zbrush,

UV Map in 3d Coat, Retopologise in 3d Coat, Then Rig & Animate in Maya but the Rigging in Maya part just screws everything up, long winded, drawn out & painful, probably what some people will say reading this.. haha 😉 

Auto-desk need to Modify the Maya tool set so that UV Mapping & Retoplogy is as easy as in 3d Coat. Then build a Auto-rigging system for Body & Facial Animation where the user doesn't have to spend weeks building a feature film or Games rig. 

The Rigging system needs to be drag and drop, no technical rubbish one click solution. All bipeds do the same things and have the same actions. As human's we only have a limited number of movements which we can perform so why not just build an Auto-rig which is easy to place with IK/Fk Switching, Reverse foot control for both feature film & Games with the option to export straight to Unity or Unreal Games Engines. 

The rigging system needs to be easy to place so that the user just drags the joints into place for the body and face, more of a one click solution. Without having to worry about Skinning issues, weighting & corrective blendshapes.

Drag and position the rig for Body and Face, Feature & Games Rigs.. Auto-Skinning, 1 Click done ! No one really cares which tools or which company they use. The question is which tools are Quickest & Easiest to use and get the job done quickly and efficiently, Time is money ! well for me it is..

So, which is Quickest & Easiest method, in my opinion unfortunately not Maya. I choose Blender.

I'd love to say the best bet is Maya because I use it so quickly & without thinking about it, it's like second nature now, it's become like a reaction rather than something I have to think about. But I guess for Rigging outside of a Major studio pipeline. The time needed to setup a rig just out weighs the pay day at the end of it.

I hope Auto-desk sit up and listen, Look at this from an Artist perspective, not a programmers or a software technician. I don't care which tool or company I use but I do care which is the quickest and most efficient use of my time..

I want to tell stories and entertain people not waste time on technicalities.

Focus on the Art !

Lee 😉

[edwardsc3]

I know your pain. I started using Maya specifically because I found Blender too unintuitive and it was easy to get lost, especially when rigging, but Maya has its own problems. I hit my braking point with Blender when several bones in a skeleton would flip direction when matched to set points, but there seemed to be no way to tell them to spin around without also flipping the skin. This was with a quite expensive human model that I purchased, and re-skinning (or baking or whatever the exact term is for connecting the skin to the bones) proved extraordinarily difficult with my limited skills - but I couldn't find any other way to do it, or any way to un-bake, flip the bone, and re-bake using the same settings.

Maya's HumanIK tool is fairly food for setting up biped controllers, but you really need to follow a good, recent, and preferably video tutorial perfectly in order to get it to work. It still has major problems - it can be utterly hopeless with elbow rotation limits if the character isn't perfectly in a T-pose at the start, for example. And my most recent major issue is that, after I build a skeleton in HumanIK that I can back to the mesh, it seems that I can't use that same skeleton to also make the IK control set (even though I've done exactly that previously, and there are numerous tutorials on YouTube that show how to do it - I think I just took a wrong turn somewhere in the process, and would need to restore from a much earlier point in order to get it right). Well I can technically create the IK control set, but it sets the location for all those controls at the origin, and thus the model becomes a crushed torso with bits of skin sticking out.

If Blender's GUI was easier to use, I would happily stick with it. But it's massive dependence on keyboard commands (or the community's dependence on them when writing instruction) is a huge problem when those commands are all context-sensitive and Blender doesn't give any indication of what context you are actually in. Other than that, the biggest problem I've had with it is figuring out how on earth it applies textures/materials to different parts of models, because there are some components with multiple textures listed in that panel, but without anything (that I could find) which corresponds those textures with the part of the mesh they affect. It's weird. 

If there were a dedicated class for either of these programs, it would probably make it a hundred times easier and faster to learn.

[Leemurray3d]

I'm a 3d character animator and modeler.

As far as I can see building characters for film and games; Autodesk seems to have stopped R&D..

There hasn't been anything new in years from what I can see, nothing that really jumps out and says wow new technology. No new tools to make life easier.

How about building a New tool set, but start by looking from a different perspective.

Look at it from a small company or freelance animators or modelers POV..

Imagine if you could focus on the characters design, movement and story, rather than rigging and skinning so painfully for each high end character.

Imagine you have small companies, or even one or two man teams who want to produce their own animations for every form of animation on the planet.. Games, TV, Advertising, AR, VR, Films, Magic leap, HTC Vive, Oculus rift, Microsoft Hololens, Unity & Unreal..

So the easy part is learning to model or sculpt..

Animation takes a little more time,

UV mapping is no problem anymore..

texturing can be tough but keep at it and you get there..

So that just leaves Rigging and Skinning.. Ok if you have a few spare years to learn to becoming a Rigging TD..

Imagine the opportunities for freelance work from all over the world and small businesses being able to start up if..

MASSIVE IF.. Autodesk developed a tool set to allow animators and modelers to Rig their own characters easily for film and games. without all the pain involved in skinning characters. Along the lines of Perseus Rig or Ice Rig..

Body and facial Animations, without Facial animation there is NO Story!!!

Without the face it is pointless, there is no expression and no emotion, the whole point of story.. to express it.

So a long winded way of saying Yes Autodesk pull your finger out and really help the little man, there will be more money to be made developing this kind of tool set to the masses than a few large studios..

In my workflow the main tools I use are:

Photoshop 

Sketchbook Pro

Zbrush

Maya - Animation, Modeling and Skinning & Rigging (Perseus Rig )

3D Coat

Substance Painter

Marmoset Tool Bag 3

Unity Game engine